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15 May 2014

As you probably know from the occasional article about cameras, I’m passionate about photography and I use every chance I get to take more photos and maybe to learn new techniques (unfortunately I’m terribly behind on tagging and uploading photos on my Flickr account…). One of the tricks I use to make organizing easier is to create folders on the camera at the start of each day. This makes it easier to manage photos after downloading them on the computer – I simply rename the folder and have a good idea about when and where those photos were taken. Since going digital I can easily capture hundreds of photos a day, so this also translates to a Flickr set per day. Another advantage is that you can quickly free up space on the storage card by deleting an entire folder rather than painstakingly deleting single photos or having to shoot at lower resolution to save space.

Another thing people recommend is always having a fully loaded backup battery with you. I learned this the hard way when the battery died during the French National Day parade and I had to take the rest of the photos with my iPhone. Unfortunately, the two tips don’t work very well together, as I discovered recently: replacing the battery will cause the camera to revert to the default folder, 100Canon. In hindsight it’s not unexpected, since many internal functions need active power to work and save settings, but it’s something you need to remember if you plan on using folders, relying on them for organization. Otherwise the photos will end up in the wrong place and you lose time getting them back in order. I don’t have other cameras to test, but I think it’s safe to assume that this applies to all Canon DSLR cameras and probably to other manufacturers as well.

Creating folders on the computer. You can alternately create folders on the computer and gain slightly more flexibility in folder names. But you must follow the general naming conventions. Folder names must be pre-pended with a unique three-digit number from 101 to 999. Then you can also include five upper and/or lowercase alphanumeric characters from A to Z plus an underscore. No spaces are allowed in folder names, and the same three-digit number cannot be used more than once. Thus, you can create a folder named 102CKL_1, but you cannot create a folder named 102SKL_1.

Apparently, you have more control over folder names if you create them on the computer!Military parade on the French National Day